Kirsten Dunst: Queen of Surprises

Her road from precocious child star to bombshell was paved with trouble and temptation. But the soulful, sardonic, and unfailingly unpredictable Kirsten Dunst was never destined to be a Hollywood cliche.

The original plan was to meet for lunch at Kirsten Dunst's favorite restaurant, Petit Trois, a French bistro in Hollywood. "I wanted to take you there," she says, "and then I thought, Oh crap. I can't eat!" Instead we're sitting in the sun on a bench outside a Culver City café, sipping iced green tea. It is not a happy state of affairs for the actress: "I am a girl who loves to go out to eat—it's one of my joys in life."

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Dunst has to lose 10 pounds in a little more than two weeks for her starring role in Woodshock, a film directed by her friends Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the sisters behind the fashion label Rodarte. "I have to look a little ill," Dunst says, "but I can't say anything more—they will freak!"

Cedric Buchet

Beginning today, courtesy of the film's producers, extremely skimpy meals and snacks are being delivered to her home. In anticipation, she spent an out-of-town weekend "loading up on hamburgers, hot dogs, and pizza" with boyfriend Garrett Hedlund, who is in Atlanta making a movie with Ang Lee. The sacrifice will be worth it, of course. She loves the Mulleavys—"they're genius girls"—and has been a Rodarte fan since she met the sisters when she was in her early twenties. "I was the first actress to wear their clothes," Dunst says. "We're a lot alike. They live with their parents in Pasadena, and I live nine houses away from my mother in the Valley. We're very family-oriented, and when we're not working we like to be home and chilled out."

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As Dunst talks she pulls her bleach blond hair to one side and twists it into a braid—a hipster Heidi in skinny jeans, flat black sandals, and Wayfarer sunglasses. Her mother Inez, for one, was excited about the diet. "She's funny," Dunst says. "She said, 'I want to lose weight with you.' I'm like, 'No, I'm not paying for a whole meal plan for you. I'm not even paying for mine. Just don't eat carbs.' "

When I ask if she's close to her mother, Dunst gives me a sardonic smile, revealing those celebrated incisors, the feral exclamation points of her smile. "Like I said, I live nine houses from her." So it's love with issues, as with most mothers and daughters. In 1993, Dunst and her younger brother Christian moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles with their parents, who separated two years later. Her father Klaus, originally from Germany, now lives in Marina del Rey. ("He's great—the kindest man," Dunst says.) Inez remains her daughter's most enthusiastic cheerleader. "It gives me anxiety to watch my films with her. My mother's so loud! And she's grabbing on to you." Dunst demonstrates. "She's very dramatic and emotional. I'm like, 'You're the actress, Inez, not me.' " She laughs, a silvery sound. "But I guess I have to get it from somewhere, right?"

Cedric Buchet

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We've met in Culver City, L.A.'s higher-end arts district, because Dunst used to paint and she still loves art. I suggested a show of paintings by Mark Grotjahn, a rising local star, at Blum & Poe. Stepping out of the bright sunshine into the cool, cavernous space, we're silenced by the solemnity of the place. It feels more church than gallery, or perhaps that's just Grotjahn's paintings: explosions of primary color reminiscent of abstract stained glass windows.

Dunst is unfamiliar with his work and is smitten. "Wow," she whispers. "These are beautiful. They remind me of peacock feathers." She steps up to a canvas. "Do you think he uses acrylics? Look how thick the paint is."

The fatigue is courtesy of the Emmy-winning FX drama Fargo, which she joined for its second season and finished shooting last week. It's her first starring role on a television series. "TV is a lot harder than film. A lot harder," Dunst says. "When I got the part, my friend Lizzy [Caplan], who is on Masters of Sex, said, 'Be sure to get B12 shots to get you through the week.' I was like, 'Really? That sounds very dramatic, Lizzy.' By the third week I was all over the B12. It was one of the best roles I've ever played—the writing is spectacular—but by the end I was tapped out."

Which is something coming from an actress who has worked nonstop for most of her 33 years. Dunst started modeling at three, made her film debut at six (in the chapter of New York Stories directed by Woody Allen), and just four years later was stealing scenes from Brad Pitt in 1994's Interview with the Vampire—the most precocious performance by a 10-year-old since Tatum O'Neal's in Paper Moon.

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Cedric Buchet

The camera very clearly loves her. "A photographic monster" is how a stylist friend describes her. What is a winsome prettiness in the flesh becomes shimmering and lustrous onscreen. That, combined with a preternatural emotional range, made even the silliest of her first 30 movies watchable—though a remarkable number were very good indeed, including Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Marie Antoinette (2006), the smarter-than-average teen flick Dick (1999), and the blockbuster franchise Spider-Man (beginning in 2002).

In her mid-twenties there were rumors of drug and alcohol abuse. Turns out the addiction was to people-pleasing. A lifetime of doing what she was told, always being the good girl, and swallowing her feelings had led to what Dunst later described as "extreme codependency." She had OD'd on Hollywood. In 2008, at 27, she voluntarily checked into Cirque Lodge, in Utah, for treatment of depression. "What people expect of an actor is totally ridiculous," she tells me now. "It's unfair that an artist is expected to speak really well in public and have skin tough enough to withstand sometimes really hurtful criticism, but also, in order to do the job, be really sensitive and in touch with their feelings. So all you can do is be yourself—just be who the hell you are."

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The high number of child actor casualties indicates that it takes time to figure that out, and some never do. Surely it says something that she addressed the problem relatively early. "I know some young actresses who are better at it," she says. "Dakota Fanning reminds me a lot of myself, but she's wiser than I was at her age."

After Cirque Lodge, Dunst relocated to New York and recommenced work with her acting coach, Greta Seacat. In 2010 she returned to the screen in the small indie All Good Things, a fictionalized account of the disappearance of Kathie Durst, who was believed to have been murdered by her husband, real estate heir Robert Durst. (Director Andrew Jarecki would later make the HBO documentary series The Jinx, which investigates that crime, among others.) Dunst had to age nine years in the film and disintegrate emotionally, and it had a poignant verisimilitude. "You felt like you were watching someone unlocking something," co-star Ryan Gosling, who played Robert, said at the time of working with Dunst. "And now that it had been exposed, she could get started."

Dunst followed that with Lars von Trier's Melancholia, one of the most powerful evocations of depression on film. Despite the subject matter, she tells me it was an idyllic experience. "When you're feeling healthy and happy, you can go to very dark places and come out fine," says Dunst, who has great affection for von Trier, with whom she shares a birthday (April 30).

Based on those two performances, Noah Hawley, creator of Fargo, cast her in the second season of his show. "I felt like Kirsten had her movie star moment, and then she made a deliberate choice to become a character actor," he says. "It has always astonished me how much is going on behind her eyes and how quickly she can move between feelings."

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Cedric Buchet

The second season of the darkly comic crime drama is set in 1979, and things "get gnarly fast," Dunst says—as in murder, or murders (the details are closely guarded). Her character, Peggy Blomquist, is a beautician in a small Minnesota town who dreams of being a celebrity hairstylist in L.A. "She is very much like me at my craziest, my mother at her craziest, my grandma at her craziest. I could really combine the nutsiest parts of the women in my family," says Dunst, whose late grandmother, coincidentally, was from Minnesota. "Some of the things she would say, how she said them—I had a lot of that inside me already."

A big challenge, one particular to TV, was the revolving door of directors. "Every two weeks you get a new one, and they each have their own way of doing things. You get used to one person's style, and then they switch it up on you. It's natural that you vibe with some more than others," she says. It's a diplomatic way of saying she didn't like some of them at all. Complicating that inconsistency was the ambition of a series in which each episode has the production values of a film. "Only, TV moves much faster than film," she says. "And Peggy talks so fast that every night I felt like I was cramming for an exam."

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During breaks in shooting in Calgary, Alberta, Dunst would return to L.A. "I remember crying to my mom, 'I don't want to go back there! Don't make me!' "

Hawley chuckles when I tell him this. "She should be exhausted. We ran her, particularly at the end, like only basic cable can do to an actor. But with Kirsten, all the drama is onscreen. The rest of the time, because she's been doing this for so long, you just feel a relaxed confidence come off her."

Hawley discovered welcome parallels with the star of Fargo's first season, Billy Bob Thornton. "There's no visible process to how they work. Every take you get something different, and all you give them is a small note. If you ask me to define what makes a movie star, that's what it is: The craft's there, but it's not visible."

Dunst shares something else with Thornton: a "slightly dangerous quality," according to Ted Danson, her Fargo co-star. "It's as if Kirsten's watching you rather than you watching her. You don't quite know what you're going to get."

In the last room of the Grotjahn show, Dunst turns and whispers, "How much do you think these paintings cost?" The young woman sitting behind the reception desk tells us that most of the canvases are priced at $2 million. We look at each other and laugh. "Let me just run to the car and get my wallet," Dunst says. Sensing that this might be taken the wrong way by the receptionist, she adds, "I mean, they're totally worth it. I would buy a painting if I could afford it." She has one of value, but mostly she collects the work of photographers. A favorite is Joseph Szabo, "and a Hunter S. Thompson photograph of a girl and a dog in Big Sur that I love."

Cedric Buchet

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Her mother trained to be a designer and painter in college. "Inez did a lot of that early on but got discouraged when someone stole her designs—and by other things," she says. The sense of disappointment reminds me of a comment Dunst once made about the boys club mentality in Hollywood. "You know what? I felt that way when I was younger, particularly being on the Spider-Man sets, which was pretty much all guys," she says. "But the older I get, the less I feel that way." Some of that has to do with the clout that comes with three decades in the business, but it's also a generational change. "What I've found," she says, "is that the cool guys now want to hang out with the cool girls."

The first Spider-Man did provide the money to buy her first home, a big, gated modernist box in the Hollywood Hills that she bought in 2003. But she discovered that she didn't like living alone; the isolation only exacerbated her insecurities. After Cirque Lodge and New York and Melancholia she returned to California full-time, this time moving close to family. "It's not big or anything, but I still don't like sleeping alone in my house," she says. Often, when Hedlund is out of town, friends sleep over. Dunst and last night's guest spent the morning watching The Bachelorette. "I like a lot of shitty shows," she says with a vaguely guilty laugh. "I like to zone out when I watch TV. " What about the Kardashians? "Oh, no, I can't do them."

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There was a time when not working made Dunst anxious. "When I was younger, it definitely bothered me. Now I absolutely love it! After working all my life, I'm very good at relaxing," she says. "The older I get, the more I don't want to be away from my mother and my friends."

She has become pickier about the projects she'll do, and that means longer stretches between jobs—a boon, it turns out, to "building a foundation" with Hedlund, whom she met on the set of On the Road in late 2011. "We've been together for three and a half years, so, yes, it's going really well," she says when I ask. "We're the same age. We have similar backgrounds [Hedlund is from Minnesota]. He feels like family to me."

Even so, Dunst comes off as a men-come-and-go-but-girlfriends-are-forever kind of woman. "I have really strong girlfriend relationships," she says. It's an array of "very different" types, "all protective of me," with Molly, an NBC employee who has been her best friend since sixth grade, the "super-mellow, level-headed" center. These days, Dunst spends most nights at Molly and her husband's house. "I was just thinking, Why don't we do much anymore? Well, my best friend just had a baby, that's why! We hang out with Lily until she goes to bed, then have a glass of wine. That's our life right now." Dunst pulls out her iPhone to share photos of her eight-month-old goddaughter. "I'm not baby-crazy," she assures me. "People show me photos of their kids, and I'm like, 'Okay, that's nice.' But this one? I've never met a baby that I love more, and I don't think I ever will, to be honest. Not unless it's my own."

In addition to Fargo, which returns in the fall, Dunst has Midnight Special coming out in November, a sci-fi chase movie from Jeff Nichols (writer and director of Take Shelter and Mud). She describes it as "a little bit Close Encounters, a little bit Starman, and totally badass." There's also talk of a third film with Sofia Coppola in 2016. It's telling, I say, that she's a muse to strong women like Coppola and the Mulleavy sisters. "The feeling is mutual," she says. "I consider them muses, too. We feed off each other."

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Cedric Buchet

When I spoke to Danson, he was most excited about a film Dunst is hoping to direct. "She's so bright and intuitive," he said. "She'll be very good with actors." Dunst has directed and co-written two shorts (including Welcome, with Winona Ryder) and for the past year has been working with a friend on a screenplay adapted from a novel, with the intention of directing it. "I don't want to let anyone down, especially myself," she says. "I'm such a hard critic on myself. But I know that I can get good people to work with me and around me, so that's a huge comfort."

Her touchstone is director John Cassavetes, particularly the work he did with his wife Gena Rowlands, who is Dunst's favorite actress. Dunst recently watched Opening Night, one of the few Cassavetes-Rowlands movies she had missed. "As an actor, that's what you strive to be like. It's the most natural performance, the most authentic," she says. "It makes me want to be better, work harder, to give a performance that maybe younger actors will look back on and think, I want to do a film like that."

Some might argue that Dunst is already doing that, though her preference for small, auteur-driven films means that her gifts, like Rowlands's, remain unknown to many moviegoers. As Tennessee Williams once wrote of Rowlands, "She arrives with talent, not a message, so she is overlooked in a way that is enraging. There is longevity in her talent and her beauty. There will be surprises."

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